Phones that recharge in 15 minutes available within a year: Oppo boss

Phones that completely recharge in 15 minutes will soon be a reality, Oppo’s Australian boss has revealed.

Phones that completely recharge in 15 minutes will be in market within a year, Oppo’s Australian boss told The Australian.

Oppo’s R9 smartphone.

Speaking after the Australian launch of the company’s R9 smartphone in Melbourne, Oppo’s Australian manager Michael Tran said the China smartphone manufacturer was well advanced with testing its new charging capability before bringing it to market.

Oppo is one of several China manufacturers seeking to make their mark in Australia with relatively high end phones that cost hundreds of dollars less when compared to well known branded phones by Apple and Samsung.

Oppo uses a fast charging technology it calls VOOC which involves charging its phone with a special cable and adaptor. “Our normal VOOC goes from 0 to 75pc in half an hour but imagine if you charge your phone from zero to 100pc in 15 minutes. And that’s what Super VOOC does. So while you’re changing or getting ready for work, you’re phone will charge to 100pc.

“Super VOOC is in its final stages of testing. We’re looking at introducing that maybe towards the end of this year or early next year,” Mr Tran told The Australian.

“But we need to make sure it’s safe the technology is safe. So you don’t want to have fast charging where the charger could overheat.”

Consumers will have to buy a new handset to use the technology. It can’t be rolled out retrospectively to existing handsets or by changing adaptors, Mr Tran said. But the China manufacturer’s new phones will have Super VOOC.

He said Oppo had been investigating wireless charging for two years. There are a few variants of wireless charging. One involves placing the handset on a charging mat, another involves charging the phone over a wireless link.

“It was in discussion two years ago but I don’t know if we’ve explored it further. But it’s something we will definitely consider,” he said.

Fifteen-minute charging however is not the fastest on the drawing board. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, Israeli materials science start-up StoreDot demonstrated charging a modified Samsung phone from 5 per cent to 100 per cent in 5 minutes. StoreDot’s aim is to build batteries that recharged in 30 seconds.

Fast charging is seen as a way around the current impasse of manufacturers being unable to make batteries that can power the most powerful of modern smartphones yet last for days.

Oppo last night announced the availability of its new R9 flagship which looks similar in design to an Apple iPhone but costs around half with a recommended local price of $599.

It also announced a partnership with national retailer JB Hi-Fi which will sell the R9 from May 9. A larger model, the R9 Plus, will sell from June.

The Oppo R9 has one of the highest resolution front-facing (selfies) cameras on the market. At 16 megapixels it’s higher than the standard back facing 13MP camera. It uses Oppo’s own layered version of Android Lollipop, ColorOS.

Mr Tran acknowledges that the often vivid and unusual fonts and decorative effects of Android that are popular in Asian markets might not sit well with Australian users and those in other western countries.

He said he was arguing within the company for Oppo to adopt plain (Vanilla) Android for models sold in Australia. “In Australia everyone wants that stock-standard Android and we’re working on that.”

Rival Huawei too has experienced more success with a phone that runs stock Android: it’s Nexus 6P built for Google and introduced last year sold well across the globe.

Mr Tran said Oppo last month became number one in offline (retail) handset sales in its China home market. The company sold 400,000 R9 handsets within the first 4 days after its launch there. Overall it sold a record 50 million smartphones globally last year.

“We’re still an unknown brand in Australia but with our partnership with JB Hi-Fi, we’ll get our brand out there.”